AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Kundoku keeps the particles
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
Kundoku keeps the particles. To a Song editor reading silently, sentence-final and connective particles (ye, yi, hu, er) are expendable elegance, and printed editions shed them; to a Japanese reader they are load-bearing, because kundoku glossing hangs its verb endings and case markers on exactly those graphs, so dropping one breaks the reading inherited from the teacher. Japanese transmission should therefore act as a selective preservative for function graphs specifically — not better transmission overall, but better in one grammatical stratum, which is the fingerprint of a reading technology rather than of scribal virtue.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Collate the Analects (and one other curricular classic) across (a) Japanese old-manuscript kunten lineages, (b) Dunhuang Tang manuscripts, and (c) the received Song-print text. Primary clause (verdict follows it): among loci where (a) and (c) differ by presence or absence of a single graph, sentence-final and connective particles make up at least 60 percent of graphs present in (a) but absent in (c), at least twice their share among the reverse class. Secondary: the Dunhuang line agrees with the Japanese line on particle presence more often than with the Song text, placing the shedding event in Song editing.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: IDP's Dunhuang Lunyu manuscripts, the Kanripo text of the Shisanjing zhushu Analects, and the published collation apparatus of the Japanese old-manuscript (kunten-bon) Analects in the standard Japanese critical editions.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries); 248-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w04_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W04 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. An output-token limit interrupted the first response turn before any tool call was made; the packet was still produced in a single Write with no information ingress.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Kunten scholarship documents that Japanese glossing hangs grammatical readings on function graphs, and Japanese old manuscripts of the Analects are known to preserve text lost or altered in Song China, anticipating the direction; the particle-stratum selective-preservation statistic across the three witness classes is un-run.
Predictions
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